Zima Blue and Other Stories

  'It exists,' Ivan said. 'And it's everything I ever said it was. But where it differs . . .' Then he paused, and allowed Sergio to bring another beaker of water to his lips, from which he drank sparingly, as if the fluid was rationed. Sergio recalled his own thirst much earlier, in the Juggernaut of the clanfolk caravan, after the ornithopter crash, then purged the thought. 'Listen,' the old man said. 'Before we continue, there's something I have to ask you. Do you mind?'

  'If I can help.'

  'Tell me about Indrani, if you'd be so kind.'

  Her name was like a penance. 'I'm sorry?' And then, before he could even hear Ivan's answer, he felt the fear uncoil inside him, like a python waking. He dashed from the room, cupping a hand to his mouth. Retracing his steps, he reached the bridge, leaned over the railinged side and was sick. For a moment, it was a thing of fascination to watch his vomit paint the pristine lower levels of the alabaster spire. Then, when the retching was over, he wiped the tears from his eyes and drew calming breaths, accessing soothing mandalas from his catechist. One of the gargoyles loomed above, large as a naval cannon, the faint curve of its jaw seeming to mock him.

  'You seem perturbed,' Bellarmine said, appearing at the bridge's end. 'I read it in the salinity of your skin. It modifies your bioelectric aura.'

  'What do you want?'

  The cloaked figure moved to his side, the rust-coloured, softly undulating landscape reflected in Bellarmine's mirror-like ovoid face. For an instant, Sergio thought he saw something: a scurry of silver or chrome, something darting between dunetops. But if it was real, it was gone now, and he saw no reason to trouble Bellarmine with his observation. 'Was there another presence, Menendez?'

  'Another what?'

  'In the room. Another such as I.'

  Sergio stared deeply into the mirror before answering. 'I think I would have noticed. Why? Ought there to have been another?'

  The Apparent leaned closer to him, as if to whisper some confidence. After a moment Bellarmine said: 'Put the question from your mind and answer this instead. What has he told you?' The armed gargoyle was reflected in the mirror now, its ugliness magnified by distortion. 'What has he told you? It is a matter of security for the Order. Silence could be considered perfidy.'

  'If the Founder wished you to know, he would not have called me from the Diocese.'

  'You are in a position of some vulnerability, Menendez.'

  'I assure you, I'll hear what he has to say,' Sergio said. 'And whatever message he has for us, I'll ensure that it returns to Vikingville.'

  He navigated to the bedside, between the monitors, and resumed his station next to Ivan. 'When you first mentioned her,' he said quietly, with more calm than he believed himself capable of, 'I dared to imagine I'd misheard you.'

  'Tell me what happened,' Ivan said, the recorder still conspicuously running. 'I'll then reciprocate by telling you what I really experienced around Perdition.'

  'Bellarmine knows about her, doesn't he?'

  'I guarantee his knowledge of events arrived via a different route than mine. I suggest you start where I did - at the beginning. You'd only recently been consecrated, hadn't you?'

  'A few days after the catechist was installed.' Sergio touched the weal on his scalp. 'It was my first mission for the Diocese - a trip north of Vikingville, to visit clanfolk. They were using consecrated servitors supplied by the Order, so there was a pretext for me to arrive with little or no notice.'

  It was not difficult to fall into the telling of what had happened. The scavenger clan's caravan had hoved into view below: a long, strung-out procession of beetle-backed machines, some barely larger than dogs, others huge as houses. The largest was the Juggernaut, the command vehicle of the caravan, in which the clan would spend months during their foraging sojourns north of Vikingville, winnowing the desert for technological relics left behind by the wars that had been waged across Mars before and after the Ecumenical Synthesis.

  Although it was decades since the last iceteroid had crashed onto the Martian surface, spilling atmosphere across the world, the climate was still roiling in search of an equilibrium it hadn't known for four billion years. Occasionally, squalls would slam into the flight path of an ornithopter, unleashing twisting vortices of separated laminar flow, too sudden and vicious to be smoothed out by the thopter's adaptive flight surfaces.

  He hadn't seen it, of course - and when it did hit, it seemed as if the adaptive flight surfaces accommodated the squall even more sluggishly than usual. One of the thopter's wings daggered into the dunes. Sergio saw the other wing buckling like crushed origami. Then - blood sucked from his head by the whiplash - he began to black out, retaining consciousness just long enough to observe the monstrous wheels of the Juggernaut rolling towards him.

  And then he woke inside the machine.

  'She was like an angel to me,' Sergio said, grateful now that he could unburden himself. 'I wasn't badly injured, really - I felt a lot worse than I had any right to. Indrani fetched me water, which tasted dusty, but was at least drinkable, and then I started to feel a little better. Naturally, I had questions.'

  'You wondered why she was alone, a girl like that, in charge of a whole foraging caravan. Was there anyone else?'

  'Oh, a brother - Haidar, eight or nine years old. I remember him because I gave him toys.'

  'Other than Haidar, though . . .'

  'She was alone, yes. I asked her, of course. She told me her parents were both dead; that they'd been killed by the Taoist Militia.' Now that he was doing most of the talking, Sergio found his mouth quickly parched, helping himself to the Founder's water. 'I could have called up the catechist's demographics database to check on her story, but I hadn't been ordained long enough to think of that. Anyway, the squall wasn't going anywhere, and neither was my ornithopter - we were stuck in the Juggernaut for a few days at the least. I was--'

  'You're about to say that you were weak, traumatised, not fully in control - not really yourself?'

  'Except it wouldn't be true, would it? I knew what I was doing. I was weak in my adherence to the Order. But strong enough to make love to Indrani. I had some toys in the ornithopter; trinkets we always carried, to pacify children and make them think favourably of the Order when they grow up. Indrani fetched them for Haidar, to keep him occupied. Then we made love.'

  'Your first time, right?'

  'There hasn't been another, either.'

  'Was it worth it?'

  'There's never been a day when I haven't thought of her, if that answers your question. I occasionally delude myself that she might have felt similarly.'

  'I'm glad. You're going to sin, at least have some fun.'

  But when the storm had died, and all that remained of his ornithopter was a pair of glistening wingtips protruding from a moraine of red dust, two lightweight surface vehicles scudded from the south. They were tricycles, bouncing on obese tyres, their riders cocooned in filigreed cockpits, enfoliated by fuel cells and comms modules.

  Indrani's parents.

  'I never understood why she'd lied to me, manufactured the whole story about running the caravan on her own; about her parents being murdered by the Taoists. Perhaps she initiated everything that happened, with that lie.'

  'That would be convenient.'

  'In any case, I never had a chance to find out. Her parents still had to dock their tricycles in the Juggernaut's vehicle bay, which gave us time to fall into our old roles. If her parents suspected anything, I never saw it. No; they shamed me with their humility and hospitality. It was another three days before we could meet with a transporter that was returning to Vikingville. And when I arrived at the seminary, they treated me as a hero. Except for some of the other priests, who seemed to guess what had happened.'

  'Yet it didn't destroy you.'

  'No,' Sergio said. 'But I always feared I'd hear her name again. I was right to fear, wasn't I?'

  'You probably imagine that she lodged a complaint with the Diocese, or that her family somehow learn
ed the truth and did it themselves. But that's not how it happened. Not at all.'

  'How did Bellarmine find out?'

  'I'll tell you, but first I have to reciprocate my side of the bargain.' Sergio took a deep breath, oddly aware now that the room seemed more claustrophobic than earlier; darker and more oppressive, as if it was physically trying to squeeze the life out of the man dying within it.

  'All right,' he said. 'I'm not sure why you wanted to know about Indrani, but you're right. I should hear about Perdition. Although I don't see how anything you can say can really--'

  'Menendez, shut up. What you saw on the cards in the seminary, on the day you were ordained, all that was true. Perdition exists; it's a neutron star, just like I always said it was.' And then Ivan talked about the nature of the star, things Sergio had learned in the seminary but then forgotten, because they were not absolutely central to his faith. That a neutron star was a sphere of nuclear matter forged in the heart of a dying star, containing as much mass as the sun, but compressed into a size no larger than Vikingville. A sugar lump from its heart would have weighed half a billion tons. Perdition was still cooling rapidly, like a cherry-red ingot removed from the furnace, implying that it had been born no more than a few hundred thousand years earlier, very close to its present position. A hot, blue star must have died, outshining the entire galaxy in its expiration. The nebula that star had shed was gone now, but there was no doubting what had happened.

  Perdition had been born in a supernova.

  'It shouldn't have existed,' Ivan said. 'No evidence for a supernova was ever found; no mini-extinction or enhancement in the local mutation rate; no dieback or brief flourish of speciation. Nothing.' The man looked around at the few candles still burning, their incense no longer the dominant smell in the room. 'Something like a supernova doesn't just happen without anyone noticing. Matter of fact, if you're as close to it as we would have been, you're not going to have the luxury of noticing much else, ever again. You're going to be a pile of ashes. And yet it must have happened, or else there'd be no Perdition.'

  'God must have intervened.'

  'Yeah. Must have poked his big, old finger into the heart of that collapsing star, causing it to happen in just such a way that we didn't get crisped. That's the point, isn't it? Our little miracle. And I suppose if you're going to have a miracle, it's not a bad one.'

  The essence of it was simple enough: it had been known, on purely theoretical grounds, that supernova explosions might not be completely symmetric; that the blast might not emerge in a perfectly spherical fashion. Tiny initial imperfections in the dynamics of the pre-explosion core collapse might be magnified chaotically, building and building, until the star blew apart in a hugely asymmetric manner, lopsidedly spilling half its guts in one direction.

  'They showed me how delicate it was,' Ivan said. 'How precise the initial conditions must have been. If they'd differed by one part in a billion--'

  'We wouldn't be having this conversation.'

  'And what does that tell you - us - Menendez?'

  Sergio looked guardedly at the recorder. An ill-chosen word at this point could ruin his position in the Diocese, yet what seemed more important now was to give the Founder the answer he wanted to hear. 'An event of staggering improbability happened, an event that had to happen for humankind to survive at all. A miracle, if you like. An act of intervention by God, who arranged for the initial conditions to be just as they had to be.'

  'You must have been teacher's pet at the seminary, son.'

  For the first time, Sergio felt angry, though he fought to keep it from his voice. 'What they taught me, Founder, is only what they learned from you, on your return from Perdition. Are you saying you were misinterpreted? '

  'No, not at all. Is that damned thing still running?'

  'Would you like me to turn it off?'

  'No, but move it closer because I want what I'm about to say to be beyond any possible doubt. Because when you take this back to the Diocese, they'll find every possible way to twist my words - even what I'm saying now.' He waited while Sergio adjusted the position of the recorder, a futile gesture but one that seemed to satisfy Ivan. Then he said: 'No one misinterpreted a word of what I said. I lied. Maybe it had something to do with the way the Kiwidinok drive interfered with brain function.'

  'That would be convenient, wouldn't it?'

  'Touche. Do you know about temporal-lobe epilepsy, Menendez? Almost no one suffers from it now, but those that do often report feelings of intense religious ecstasy.'

  After long moments, Sergio said: 'The kinds of drugs that have been administered to you could cause hallucinations, I think. With all respect.'

  Ivan pivoted his body across to the other side of the bed, rummaging in the dark pile of effects placed on the nightstand next to it. He held up a syringe, needle glistening in candlelight. 'I told them I was more frightened than in pain. It's hard to die a prophet when you don't believe, Menendez. They gave me this drug; said it purged fear. Well, maybe it did - but not enough.'

  Words formed in Sergio's mouth and seemed to emerge of their own volition.

  'How did you lie, and why did you do it?'

  'To begin with, it wasn't really lying; I don't think I was clinically sane, and I think I believed my own delusions as much as anyone. But afterwards - when my brain function had stabilised, perhaps - then it became lying, because I decided to maintain the untruth I'd already started. And you know what? There was nothing difficult about it. More than that, it was seductive. They wanted to believe everything I said, and there was nothing that could be contradicted by the recording devices. And in return they feted me. I didn't ask for it, but before I knew it I was at the centre of a cult - one that imagined it glimpsed God in the asymmetric physics of a stellar collapse. And then the cult became a religious movement, and because it was the only movement that had no need for faith, it soon absorbed those that did.'

  'The Synthesis.'

  Ivan's nod was very weak now. 'It was much too late to stop it by then, Menendez. Not without having them turn against me. But now I'm dying . . .'

  'They won't love you for it.'

  'Sooner be reviled than martyred. Devil always had the best tunes, eh? Seems healthier to me. Which is why you're here, of course. To hear the truth, take it back to Vikingville and begin dismantling the Order.'

  'They'll hate me equally,' Sergio said, feeling as if he was debating a piece of theological arcana that had no connection with reality. 'Besides - I still don't see how you can possibly have been lying, if Perdition exists. If there was no divine intervention, then all that's left is - what, massive improbability?'

  'Exactly.'

  'And that's somehow preferable?'

  'Truthful, maybe. Isn't that all that matters?' Ivan said it with no great conviction, still holding the syringe up to the light, as if putting it down would have been the more strenuous act. 'Quantum mechanics says there is a small but finite probability that this syringe will vanish from my hand and reappear on the other side of the Temple wall. What would you think if that happened?'

  'I'd think you were a skilled conjuror. If, however, there was no deception . . . I'd have to conclude that a very unlikely event had just happened.'

  'And what if your life depended on it happening?'

  'I don't follow.'

  'Well, imagine that the liquid in this syringe is an unstable explosive; that in one second it'll detonate, killing everyone inside this room. If the syringe didn't jump, you'd be dead.'

  'And if I survive . . . it must, logically, have happened. But that's not very likely, is it?'

  'Never said it was. But the point is, it doesn't have to be - an event can be incredibly unlikely, and still be guaranteed to happen, provided there are sufficient opportunities for it to happen, sufficient trials.'

  'Nothing profound in that.'

  'No, but in the quantum view the trials happen simultaneously, in as many parallel versions of reality as are necessary to cont
ain all possible permutations of all quantum states. Are you following me?'

  'I was, until a moment ago.'

  A smile haunted the old man's lips. 'Let's say that there are, for the sake of argument, a billion possible future versions of this room, each containing one identical or near-identical copy of you and me. Of course, there are many more than a billion - it's a number so huge that the physical universe wouldn't be large enough for us to write it down. But call it a billion. Now, each of those rooms differs from this one on the quantum level, but in the majority of cases the change is going to look random, meaningless. There will also be changes that look suspiciously coherent. But all that's happening is that every possible probabilistic outcome is being played out, completely blindly.' He waited while Sergio fetched him some more water, brow furrowed as if composing his thoughts. 'Logically, there exists a future state of the room in which the syringe borrows enough energy to tunnel beyond the wall and explode safely. It's unlikely, yes, but it will happen if there are sufficient trials. And in the quantum view, those trials all happen instantly, simultaneously, every moment we breathe. We feel ourselves moving seamlessly along one personal history, whereas we're shedding myriad versions of ourselves at each instant - some of which survive, some of which don't.' He released the syringe, allowing it to clatter to the floor, amongst the personal detritus next to his bed. 'Not bad for an effluent disposal technician from Smolensk, huh?'